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This post explores options for the application Machine Learning techniques to the Australian residential property market with the objective of predicting insights that would be useful for buyers, sellers and the industry. With access to good data it is possible to predict sale/auction prices by home, street, suburb, municipality, etc. We could also predict number […] Read more

I often say that Machine Learning is like programming in the 60s, you prepare your program, double check everything, hand in your punch cards to the IBM operator, go home and wait. And just like back then, if you had a bug in your code it would mean a huge amount of wasted time. Sometimes […] Read more

In this article I am going to discuss the importance of naming conventions in ML projects. What do I mean by naming conventions? I mainly mean using descriptive ways of labelling features in a data set. What is the reason for this? Speed of experimentation. Naming Conventions Categorical columns start with ‘c_’ Continuous (numerical) columns […] Read more

I miss very few things from the Java language, one gem I really miss is the package-private accessibility modifier. This was so useful, your IDE colour coded your package classes in another colour so you knew they were not part of the public API. You could skim read the files in a package (namespace) and […] Read more

‘Software entities (classes, modules, functions, etc.) should be open for extension but closed for modification.‘ [R. Martin] The OCP is a set of strategies based on inheritance and polymorphism that aims to make code more extensible with fewer side effects when extending. The way side effects are controlled is by adding functionality to the system without […] Read more

Over the coming weeks I plan to do a bit of a study on the SOLID principles. SOLID stands for: Single Responsibility Open-Closed Liskov Substitution Interface Segregation Dependency Inversion The term was coined by Robert Martin [http://cleancoder.posterous.com/]. The five principles if used judiciously should result in code that is easier to maintain by being highly […] Read more

After much effort, trying to get the default DatabaseAppender working in log4net I decided to write my own, so with the help of one of my alpha geeks (Tnx Chinsu) we created this awesome (its awesome because it uses batch inserts and actually works on Azure) database appender for Log4Net. https://gist.github.com/965366 Use at your own […] Read more

For a project we are currently working on here at PicNet we decided to forgo the bloat of ASP.Net and Mvc and go for a super light weight web platform. We tried Kayak but this was a little too ‘bare’ so we then shifted our attention to Nancy which is a Sinatra clone (well, “inspired” […] Read more

It gives me great pleasure to anounce that PicNet’s closure control library is now public. We have started with only 2 of our controls but over the next few weeks we will port all of our control code to this project. For a demo just visit http://picnet.github.com/picnet_closure_repo/demos/. The google closure library is a project that I […] Read more

One of the hardest things about getting started properly with Google Closure Tools is that it has a huge amount of framework boilerplate that needs to be organised in order to write your first line of code. I have found that the effort is definately worthwhile but the process can definatelly be simplified. These views are shared by […] Read more